Category: Metaphilosophy

The Existential versus the Merely Theoretical: Some Responses to a Reader

A young Brazilian reader, Vini, refers to an article of mine, Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove? and asks me some questions about it. He is clearly one of those whose interest in philosophy is deeply existential and not merely theoretical or academic.  ‘Existential’ has several meanings both inside and outside of philosophy.  I am using it roughly in the way it is used by such so-called existentialists as Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Marcel, early Sartre, and many others.  For such as these, philosophy is not an academic game. It is not about solving intellectual puzzles, or about achieving a merely theoretical, and thus impersonal view of the world that abstracts from the lived life of the individual truth-seeker who seeks a truth  that is subjectively appropriable and personally transformative. On an existential understanding of philosophy’s task and goal it cannot be science given that science aims at a wholly  impersonal, or third-personal, or objective view of things, as if Being could be wholly objectified.  Being cannot be wholly objectified  because, in Jaspersian terms, Being is das Umgreifende, the Encompassing, which includes both subject and objects  

Now either you understand what I am driving at with these sketchy remarks or you don’t. If what I have just written doesn’t resonate with you, if you have no idea what I am getting at, then you are wasting your time reading my work. For everything I write, no matter how tediously technical or politically polemical, is oriented toward One Thing, the achieving of my  individual, personal, intellectual-cum-spiritual salvation, even if such salvation requires the dissolution of the ego or separative self and its absorption into the eternal Atman or a Buddhist or Christian equivalent or near-equivalent thereof. Sounds paradoxical doesn’t it?  How could the salvation of the self require the dissolution of the self? But paradox, contradiction, absurdity and mystery are endemic to our predicament and must be addressed by the philosopher who knows what he is about and is serious about penetrating to the truth of our predicament.  Science, by contrast, seeks to banish mystery.

Again, you either catch my drift or you don’t.  Young Vini, I suspect, does. He comes across as vexed and tormented by questions that to the superficial are merely academic puzzles.  What he has written strikes me as a cri de coeur, and so I feel I ought to be of what little assistance I can be.  My years of Sturm und Drang lie 50 years in the past, but their animating spirit remains for me tutelary, guarding and guiding, daimonic in the Socratic sense.   

Vini writes,

4) On your post “Retorsion Revisited: How Far Does it Reach and What Does it Prove?”, you said: “3.  I exist.  The thought that I do not exist is unthinkable salva veritate.  Only I can think this thought, and my thinking of the thought falsifies its content, and this is so even if ‘I’ picks out merely a momentary self.  (I am not committed by this to a substantial self.)  So we have performative inconsistency.  Unfortunately, this does not show that I exist apart from my thinking.” So, I must ask: do you think that the self is a substance, or have you changed your mind? This got me a little bit confused, since I may have missed the context.

BV:  I think you have missed the context. What I am asking in the post is whether retorsion/retortion is a philosophical procedure or tool that can secure metaphysical results.  I wrote:

To be a successful metaphysical tool, a retorsive argument must establish the target proposition as true unconditionally and not merely on condition that there exist contingent beings like us who occasionally and contingently engage in such intellectual operations as affirmation and denial.    Otherwise, it would have no metaphysical significance, but merely a transcendental one.  (‘Transcendental’ is here being used in roughly the Kantian way.)

I am not addressing the question whether the self is a substance as opposed to a bundle of experiences. The point I am making is that retorsion does not establish the existence of the self on either conception.  The argument I gave commits me neither to a substantial self nor to a momentary self.  When you ask whether I changed my mind, you are assuming that in my “Chariot” article and the other posts directed against the Pali Buddhist ‘no self’ doctrine I am affirming a substance view of the self. But please note that if propositions P, Q are logically contradictory (i.e., cannot both be true and cannot both be false), and I show that the arguments for P are not rationally coercive, it does not follow that (a) I must find the arguments for Q rationally coercive, or (b) that I accept Q.  After all, the problem may be insoluble by us. In the anti-Buddhist articles and entries I was showing that there are good reasons for rejecting the Buddhist anatta/anatman doctrine. A good reason needn’t be rationally coercive or rationally compelling or philosophically dispositive. (I am using these phrases interchangeably.)

To take a different example, if I reject every version of presentism in the philosophy of time, it does not follow that I must accept some version of anti-presentism.

5) I think this question is one of the most important ones: Can I really rest assured that the self does exist, and it is like a Substance? To be completely honest with you, Bill, one thing that this whole 6-year experience showed me is that I know nothing or almost nothing about the world. I never thought in my life that we could even doubt about the reality of things such as the self. Back in the day, this shocked me. I was (and still somehow am) very afraid of things that I don’t know, like “what if there is a hidden argument that I don’t know,” “what if they are right,” and so on. I’m 27 years old, and I got a lot of things wrong in my life — but this is one I don’t want to be wrong about. You know, there are a lot of things with an intellect far, far superior to mine, such as Butchvarov, Husserl, and so on, that you are well aware of, that may have found arguments that I couldn’t even imagine in my lifetime. But, at the same time, I think that philosophy, above all else, can give definitive and satisfactory answers to life. It’s not an empirical science ‘guessing game,’ where things can flip from right to wrong in the bat of an eye (like, if someone got something wrong, he will be wrong no matter what, and that’s what I think about Buddhists, Harris and Co. on these matters). But, at the same time, I have this insecurity of getting things wrong, of something that might not be “sufficient” to show what I want to understand (in that case, the self), since I know so little of philosophy. So how could I rest assured that, no matter the hard work, they will be wrong? The self can’t be a guessing game. I think that there must be a way to establish the truth of this, regardless of the endless discussions that philosophers may have in the future (if he’s right, he’s right; if wrong, he’s wrong). I’m very afraid of being wrong, getting something wrong, and that there is an “unknown argument” that may tumble down what I think is right, but, at the same time, if I had all these dialectical worries since 2019, how could I possibly not exist (as a Substance)? I’m confused, since I also lend more value to what others said rather than my own experience… I don’t know how to think this through. Can you share your thoughts about this? A word of experience from someone who saw a lot more in life than I ever had would be very comforting to hear, especially from a philosopher. Even though your motto is “study everything, join nothing,” I really think that you can have a definitive answer on that matter. 

In all of that, sorry for the gigantic, torah-like email. I tried my best to express my worries as quickly as possible and tell you all of them in one shot. As I said, I really hope God touches your heart to help me with these questions. I really, really hope you could spare or find some time to answer me this. Even though for some people these questions are trivial, for me, I think they are life-changing and something that we live up to. I know I sound a little bit platonic (maybe I am), but I think the same centelha [scintilla, see here]of philosophy that resides in you will find and understand the questions in mine. 

May God bless you, Bill.

BV:  There are different types of philosopher. In another place in your Torah-like e-mail, you say you like Ed Feser’s work.  Ed is an ultra-competent expositor and defender of the metaphysics underpinning traditional Roman Catholicism. For him the ultimate truth, which is a salvific truth, is housed in the (trad) RCC.  He believes that he found the Answer there, his Answer, but also the Answer, the Answer for everyone whether they accept it or not.   I classify him as a dogmatic affirmer. The polar opposite is the dogmatic denier. I am neither. I am a critical inquirer in the Socratic tradition. Feser thinks the existence of God can be proven.  I deny that the existence of God can be proven, but I also deny that the existence of God can be disproven.  What holds for God, holds for the soul, and all the rest of our highest concerns.

You want to know (with objective certainty) whether the self is a substance that persists, numerically self-same over time, an immaterial substance, capable of existing whether or not it is embodied.  This burning desire to know is what distinguishes the true philosopher from the academic hacks and functionaries who dominate our universities. Many of them are clever, and some are brilliant, but they suffer from existentielle Bodenlosigkeit (Karl Jaspers).   Their work is a game, a job, a way of filling their bellies. It does not well up from their Existenz.  Their real lives are elsewhere.  They don’t live for philosophy, but from it, and they would drop it like a hot potato if they could no longer fill their bellies from it. The great Augustine said he wanted to know, more than anything else, two things:, God and the soul: deum et animam scire cupio.  So, Vini, you and I are in good company.

So are God and the soul (immaterial substantial self) real or not?  Can we KNOW the answer to that question? You say it can’t be a guessing game. You are right about that.  It can’t be a matter of flipping a coin or making a guess. That way of talking trivializes the question, as does, I am afraid, Pascal’s talk of a wager.  The great Pascal betrays the depth and seriousness of his thought with talk like that, though one understands how a great mathematician and contributor to probability theory would think like that.  Be that as it may.

It’s not a guessing game, but nonetheless in the end you must decide what you will believe and how you will live. There are no objective certainties and no knock-down proofs  in this life with respect to the Big Questions and the Ultimate Objects.  Genuine knowledge in these precincts is unattainable by us here below. Our cognitive architecture is not up to the task. Our reason is weak and merely discursive. And the noetic consequences of sin may have to be factored in.

“I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,” wrote Kant in the preface to the 2nd edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. The great Kant was on the right track. Reason is dialectical in his sense and simply not up to the task of laying bare the nature of the ultimate.

You say, “I think that there must be a way to establish the truth of this.” That is precisely what I deny assuming by ‘establish’ you mean conclusively prove.  Reasoned belief is as far as we can go. Th  dogmatic affirmers, driven by overpowering doxastic security needs, fool themselves when they pass off arguments that are objectively inconclusive as proofs. I am not saying that they are intellectually dishonest; I am saying that they are in the grip of an overpowering need to be secure in their beliefs.

But more on this later, if you like. I welcome your objections, Vini.  Please respond here on this blog, the latest version of Maverick Philosopher. If you do so you will have the honor of being the first to anoint my combox with comments.

The Concept of Standoff in Philosophy

Substack latest.

A second example:

3. God by his very nature as divine is a concrete being who exists of metaphysical necessity.

4. Nothing concrete could exist of metaphysical necessity.

By ‘concrete’ I mean causally active/passive. The God in question is not a causally inert abstract object like a number or a set-theoretical set. Clearly, (3) and (4) form a contradictory pair and so cannot both be true. And yet one can argue plausibly for each.

This is not the place for detailed arguments, but in support of (3) there are the standard Anselmian considerations. God is ens perfectissimum; nothing perfect could be modally contingent; ergo, etc. God is “that than which no greater can be conceived”; if God were a merely contingent being, then a greater could be conceived; ergo, etc.

In support of (4), there is the difficulty of understanding how any concrete individual could exist necessarily. For such a being, possibility suffices for actuality: if God is possible, then he is actual. But this possibility is not mere possibility; it is the possibility of an actual being. (God is at no time or in any possible world merely possible, if he is possible at all.) The divine possibility — if it is a possibility at all and not an impossibility — is a possibility that is fully actualized. Possibility and actuality in God are one and the same in reality even though they remain notionally distinct for us. (In classical jargon, God is pure act, actus purus.) Equivalently, essence and existence in God are one and the same in reality even if they must remain notionally distinct for our discursive/dianoetic intellects. It is God’s nature to exist. God is an existing essence in virtue of his very essence. God’s existence is in no way subsequent to his essence, not temporally, of course, but also not logically or ontologically. So it is not quite right to say, as many do, that God’s nature entails his existence; God’s nature is his existence, and his existence is his nature.

If you think this through very carefully, you will realize that the ground of the divine necessity is the divine simplicity. It is because God is an ontologically simple being that he is a necessary being. If you deny that God is simple but affirm that he is necessary, then I will challenge you to state what makes him necessary as opposed to impossible. If you say that God is necessary in virtue of existing in all possible worlds, then I will point out that that gets us nowhere: it is simply an extensional way of saying that God is necessary. You have also faied to distinguish God from such ‘garden variety’ necessary beings as numbers and sets.

Divine simplicity implies no real distinctions in God, and thus no real distinction between essence and existence. It is the identity of essence and existence in God that is the root, source, ground of the divine necessity. The problem is that we, with our discursive intellects, cannot understand how this could be. Anything we conceive as existent, we can also conceive as nonexistent. (Hume) The discursive intellect cannot grasp the possibility of a simple being, and so it cannot grasp the possibility of a necessary concretum. Here then we have the makings of an argument that, in reality, every concretum is contingent, which is equivalent to the negation of (4).

So if one philosopher urges (3) and his interlocutor (4), and neither can convince the other, then the two are in a standoff.

Now you may quibble with my examples, but there are fifty more I could give (and you hope I won’t).

Solubility Skepticism, Religion, and Reason

Stack topper.  Here are four addenda to what I say in the Substack entry.

1) A skeptic is an inquirer, not a denier. Too many confuse doubt, the engine  of inquiry, with denial. If I doubt that such-and-such, I neither affirm it nor deny it.

2) Is doubting whether a proposition is true the same as suspending judgment as to its truth-value? A subtle question. I think we should say that it is not. For if doubt is the engine of inquiry, then we doubt in order to attain such truth as we are able to attain. But if one suspends judgment as to the truth-value of some proposition P — if one 'suspends P'  for short — one may do so with no intention of trying to determine whether P is true. For example, I suspend judgment, take no doxastic stance, on the question whether the number of registered Democrats in Maricopa County is odd or even. I don't know, I don't care, and I will do nothing to find out.  Suspension, not doubt.

3) Another subtle difference is that between suspension (withholding of assent) or Pyrrhonist epoché in the broad sense, which is related to but quite different from Husserlian epoché, and Pyrrhonist epoché in the narrow sense.   A standard treatment of the former is along the following lines (Wikipedia):

The Pyrrhonists developed the concept of "epoché" to describe the state where all judgments about non-evident matters are suspended to induce a state of ataraxia (freedom from worry and anxiety). The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus gives this definition: "Epoché is a state of the intellect on account of which we neither deny nor affirm anything." This concept is similarly employed in Academic Skepticism but without the objective of ataraxia.

Benson Mates adds a nuance by distinguishing between withholding assent with respect to truth-value and withholding assent with respect to sense (Frege's Sinn).  I endorse the distinction. Consider the proposition expressed by the standard Trinitarian formula, 'There is one God in three divine persons.' (My example.) What mental attitudes can we take up with respect to this proposition?  I count five: Affirm, Deny, Doubt, Suspendtv (withhold assent with respect to truth-value), Suspends (withhold assent with respect to the question whether the proposition has a determinate sense or meaning).  For example, one might maintain that the Trinitarian formula has or makes no sense, which is to say that no definite proposition is expressed by the verbal utterance or inscription. If the formula makes no sense, then it does not express a proposition, a proposition being a sense, whence it follows that the formula cannot have a truth-value. 

4) A solubility skeptic with respect to the central problems of philosophy is not the same as a problem skeptic. I am not a problem skeptic. I don't doubt that the central problems are genuine, pace the later Wittgenstein. The central problems are genuine, not pseudo, but I doubt whether they are soluble by us. So doubting, I conjecture that they are not soluble by us as the best explanation of why they haven't been solved.

Philosophy and Science: Continuity or Discontinuity? Presentism Meets Physics

Malcolm Pollack writes,
 
I hope you'll forgive me for hammering you with emails, but I just wanted to thank you for inviting me to join you in giving this paper a careful going-over. [Christian Wuetrich, "The Fate of Presentism in Modern Physics" in New Papers on the Present, Philosophia Verlag, 2013, 91-131. ] It has given me, as a civilian, yet another opportunity to appreciate the care and attention to detail that professionals in your field must bring to their work. I was struck in particular by this paragraph, from section 3:
 
  "The acceptance of a conflict between presentism and not only SR [Special Relativity], but all of current, as well as prospective, fundamental physics paired with an insistence on presentism amounts to a rather comprehensive rejection of physics. It thus fundamentally contravenes naturalism, a venerable tradition going back at least to Aristotle. According to naturalism, philosophical—and metaphysical—inquiry is continuous with scientific inquiry. To be sure, naturalism is not a logical truth—it is a substantive philosophical thesis. But it is one whose defence has to wait for another day; for present purposes, I simply assume a minimal naturalism which demands that no philosophical thesis be in manifest contradiction to facts established by our best science. Restricting this weak thesis to metaphysics, it can be translated as necessitating that the physically possible worlds are a subset of the metaphysically possible ones, for if the metaphysical theories were in contradiction to the physical ones, then there would have to be some physically possible worlds (and perhaps all) which are metaphysically impossible, as for the metaphysical theory to be incompatible with physics, it would have to rule out some physically possible worlds as impossible. In other words, metaphysics would a priori deem impossible what physics affirms is possible. Assuming that all physically possible worlds are also logically possible, I see little justification for disavowing this weak form of naturalism." 
 
I find this precision, clarity, and style delightful entirely on its own, quite apart from any conclusions it may be leading to. Much obliged.
 
Malcolm,
 
I thank you in return for giving me the opportunity to achieve clarity on these topics in connection with a book on metaphilosophy I must finish before the Grim Reaper (Benign Releaser?) lops my head off.   As a chess player you know what it is like to be in time trouble with Sudden Death looming, except that it this case it is a scythe and not a flag that will fall.  And what the fall will end won't be a mere game.
 
I will begin by listing some of the main points in W's article, clarifying the key terms, and formulating some of the issues that arise.  Ask any questions or make any objections that occur to you. If you find anything I say less than clear, say so.  Double quotes mean that I am literally quoting the author. For all other purposes I use single 'quotes.' (One of those uses is instanced in the immediately preceding sentence.) Numbers in parentheses are page references.
 
1) The author is committed to thinking of time as spacetime, a four-dimensional manifold M composed of "points."  (92) These are spacetime points or temporal locations specifiable by x, y, z, and t coordinates, where a spacetime point is a punctuate (duration-less) instant.  I take it that M is a continuum so that, between any two instants, or temporal locations, there are continuum-many (2-to-the-alepth-null) instants or temporal locations. This assumes Cantorian set theory and the actual (as opposed to potential) infinite.  But then  on the same page, he speaks of "events."  As I see it, an event is not the same as the time(s) at which it occurs.  (The occupant of a spatiotemporal location is not the same as the location it occupies.) I should think that there are times when nothing happens, i.e., when no event occurs,  but that whenever an event occurs it must occur at a time or over times.  The same goes for spacetime points. Some are unoccupied by physical events, no? An event that is not punctuate like an instant I call  a process, even it it lasts only a nanosecond. Nanoseconds and related terms pertain to the "metric" which applies to M. (92)  An example of a process, i.e., an extended event, is a storm or a melody.  A side point worth pondering is that the universe, supposing it began to exist with a Big Bang, could be metrically finite (12 or so billion years old) despite M's having the cardinality of the continuum, which implies that there are continuum-many events/times between now and the Big Bang
 
One of the issues that arises here, one not discussed by W., is whether concrete things such as the piano on which the melody is played can be "assayed" (technical term of Gustav Bergmann with mining provenience) as extended events or processes. If so, then pianos and piano players have temporal parts in addition to spatial parts — a view vehemently denied by many philosophers.  A melody is not wholly present at every time at which it exists; is the same true of Billy Joel? Melodies and storms unfold over time; they have phases. Do persons unfold over time? Is a person a diachronic collection of person-phases? A person persists through time, no doubt — 'persists' is a datanic term  in my lexicon — but does he persist by enduring or by perduring? Is a person or a concrete thing/substance wholly present at every time at which it exists or not? This question goes to the back burner.
 
2) Given the fundamental presupposition that time is in reality spacetime, eternalism and presentism are defined by the author as follows. Eternalism is "the position claiming physical existence for all events in M," whereas presentism "partitions events into past, present, and future events" together with the proviso  that only the events belonging  to the present partition enjoy ontological privilege. (92) "Thus the sum total of physical existence is a proper subset of that according to the eternalist." (92)
 
This I find less than clear. What does the author mean by physical existence? As opposed to what? Surely not mental or abstract/ideal existence.  Does he mean the existence of events at times, as opposed to the times at which they exist?  An event is not the same as the spacetime point or points at which it occurs.  Is it not obvious that the occupant of a location, whether spatial or temporal or spatiotemporal, is not the same as the location? A location exists just as well occupied as unoccupied. Does the author mean to tell us that events exist physically but that times, though they exist, do not exist physically?
 
Connected with this lack of clarity is the following objection. Presentism is usually explained as the view that temporally present items (whether times or events or members of other categories) alone exist, and thus that wholly past items and wholly future items do not exist, where 'wholly' rules out overlap with the present.   If that is what is meant by presentism, then W. hasn't captured it in his definition.  For if present items are a proper subset of all existing items (spatiotemporal locations  and events at those locations) then those past and future items also exist. But then we are no longer talking about presentism.  Presentism is precisely the denial of the existence of the past and the future. The author appear to be begging the question in favor of eternalism by assuming that eternalism is true and that presentism can be defined in terms of it.  This ignores the fact that eternalism and presentism are mutually exclusive.
 
If presentism is the logical contradictory of eternalism, then what exists according to presentism cannot be a proper subset of what exists according to eternalism.  The author my be fudging the issue with his obscure talk of physical existence.
 
3) We were told that presentism partitions M into past, present, and future events.  Now what makes present events present? Here is where simultaneity comes into the picture.  Simultaneity is an equivalence relation (reflexive, symmetrical, transitive) that effects the partition that creates a proper subset of events, the present ones, and distinguishes them from those to their past and those to their future.  This puzzles me for a couple of reasons which I will sketch now, and try to explain more clearly tomorrow.
 
First, the present as we experience it is not punctuate but specious, in William James's sense of 'specious.' It has a certain spread or duration.  'Now' in 'The sun is now rising' picks out a short period of time that had not yet begun when the sun was below the horizon and will be over a short time later, say in an hour. Sunrise is not an instantaneous event by a a process.
 
Second, how does what the author says distinguish the present present from past and future presents? After all, at every time or temporal location t in M there is an equivalence class of simultaneous events at t. It follows that there are many — continuum-many! — presents, each equally present at itself.  The present present, however, is not merely present at itself, but present simpliciter. It is the 'privileged present,' the absolute present.  Presentism is committed to an absolute present. So again, it seems that our author has not put his finger on what privileges the present present, and distinguishes it from past and future presents.
 

From the Mail Bag: Old-Time Reader Swims the Tiber

This just in from Russell B.:

Long time no talk.

I hope you’re doing well. I have been thinking about your work on existence over the past 3-4 years very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it has made me swim the Tiber (well, I was born and raised Catholic so did I actually leave?). But I had to leave Protestantism; there was nothing left for me there. However, my biggest problem was divine simplicity. Long story short: I think your view (and Barry Miller’s view) is more or less the proper way to think about existence which in turn helps make DDS easier to swallow. And, if I might add, while the view is philosophically rich, I find the mystical and religious implications much richer. I have been obsessed with the mystics and in particular Teresa of Avila and Juan de la Cruz. I am unsure if you have felt similar ways in which their ideas deeply coincide with a God that just is Being itself. I don’t really know if I have words to describe how other than it just 'appears' to me that way.
 
Another way in which you helped me religiously was helping me decide between between Eastern Orthodoxy and Rome. They are essentially the same religion but I remember you saying that we need to approach truth from four different angles: philosophically, morally, religiously, and mystically. Well, I would say that Catholicism uses all four of these approaches while Orthodoxy ignores the first. This was huge for me. Now I know you have problems with the amount of dogma the Catholic Church has. This was also a stumbling block for me but I have tried to approach the matter like the parable where Jesus says only a child will enter the Kingdom of Heaven. It has been humbling to say the least. 
 
Very good to hear from you, Russell.  Here are a couple of questions and some comments that will interest you and perhaps others.
 
1) What were your reasons for becoming a Protestant in the first place and then leaving Protestantism, apart from acceptance of DDS? And what sect did you leave?
 
2) You ask whether I think  mysticism, particularly that of the two great Spanish mystics you mention, coheres with the notion of a God who is ipsum esse subsistens.  I do indeed. I am sure you are aware of Exodus 2:14: Ego sum qui sum . . . dic illis: QUI EST misit me ad vos. On Mount Sinai God reveals himself to Moses, and communicates to him the following message to be relayed to those at the foot of the mountain, a message presumably not couched in the words of  any human language: "I am who am . . . say this, 'He Who Is sent me to you.' "
 
To my mind, this passage from Exodus expresses the identity of the God of the Bible with the God of the philosophers. The God of the Bible, a being, reveals himself to man as Being itself.  The two upward paths, that of religion and that of philosophy, come together as one at the apex of the ascent in the divine simplicity.  The ascent to the Absolute is thus onto-theological.  And so, the two paths, neither of which in itself is a mystical path, culminate in a mystical unity, that of the simple God.  It is a mystical unity in that it defies discursive grasp.  We ineluctably think in opposites and naturally balk at talk of a thing identical to its attributes, its attributes identical to one another, its essence  identical to its existence, and so on.
 
You can come to understand how a God worth his salt must be ontologically simple without being able to understand how he could be ontologically simple. You can reason your way up to the simple God, but not into him or his life.  There will be no syllogizing in the Beatific Vision.  Discursivity must be dropped as it must also be dropped in the transition from ordinary, discursive prayer to the Prayer of Quiet, the first stage of infused contemplation, with several more beyond it.  These stages are well-described in Teresa's Interior Castle, and in all the manuals of mystical theology.  Poulain, about whom I say something over at Substack, is particularly good.
 
Mystics properly so called, such as Teresa de Avila and Juan de la Cruz, are able to jump immediately to the apex by mystical intuition.  And so there are three upward paths, although the mystical way is perhaps not well-described as a path inasmuch as it can be trod in an instant  without any preparatory ascesis if one receives an infusion of divine grace. (Grace is gratuitous and so cannot be brought about by any technique.)   The philosopher plods along, discursively, step by step. The religionist proceeds tediously with rites and rituals, petitions and penances and processions, fasting and almsgiving, kneeling and standing.  Mystics, properly so-called, do these things  as well, but not as well and not as much.  You may have noticed, Russell, that St. Teresa is a pretty sharp thinker who works out a criteriology for the evaluation of mystical experiences in The Interior Castle, a late work of hers, and the one I would recommend to people above her others.  It is short and easy to read.
 
As for Thomas Aquinas, the main exponent of DDS, he too is a mystic, a minor mystic if you will, not at the level of Teresa and Juan, not to mention Meister Eckhart, et al.   I believe the only experience of Thomas's we are aware of is the one at the end of his life which prompted him to give up writing. See my Substack article, Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished? Aquinas is all three: philosopher, religionist, mystic.  Or it might be better to say he wears four hats: philosopher, religionist, theologian, mystic. 
 
This response is beginning to get lengthy, so I'll leave two more comments I have until later.  The Comments are enabled.
 
 
Ipsum esse tattoo

On Writing Philosophy

One writes the hard-core stuff with no assurance that one will  be read, except by a few. And these few cannot be expected to read with much care and almost certainly not with the care the author expended in writing. And of the those who read with care, only a few of them will actually understand what the author is maintaining.

And soon enough, for the vast majority, one's book will languish on a library shelf  to gather dust or else end up in a remainder bin.  

So why do we write?  For the same reason the great philosophers wrote. To get at the truth, to articulate the inchoate, to know one's mind, to realize one's mind.  

Disagreement in Philosophy: Notes on Jiří Fuchs

J FuchsThat philosophers disagree is a fact about which there is little disagreement, even among philosophers. But what this widespread and deep disagreement signifies is a topic of major disagreement. One issue is whether or not the fact of disagreement supplies a good reason to doubt the possibility of philosophical knowledge.  

The contemporary Czech philosopher Jiří Fuchs begins his book Illusions of Sceptics (2016) by considering this question.  He grants that the "cognitive potential of philosophy" is called into question by the "embarrassing fact that there is not a single thing that philosophers would agree on." (13) Nevertheless, Fuchs insists that we have no good reason to be skeptical about the possibility of philosophical knowledge. His view is that "Discord among philosophers can . . . be sufficiently explained by the frequent prejudices of philosophers . . . Consequently, the existence of discord among philosophers does not imply that their work is of fundamentally unscientific character." (16)

Besides the prejudices of philosophers, the lack of consensus among philosophers may also be attributed to philosophy's difficulty: "the discord may just be a consequence of the specific challenging character of philosophy."(19)

Fuchs maintains that "consensus has no relation to the core of scientific quality. . . ." (24). The core of scientific quality is constituted by "proof or demonstration." (24)  His claim is that interminable and widespread disagreement or lack of consensus has no tendency to show that philosophy is incapable of achieving genuine knowledge, where such knowledge involves apodictic insight into the truth of some philosophical propositions. 

There are two main issues we need to discuss. One concerns the relation of consensus and truth; the other the relation of consensus and knowledge. My impression is that Fuchs conflates the two issues. I will argue, contra Fuchs, that while it is obvious that consensus and truth are logically independent, it is not obvious that consensus and knowledge are logically independent.  My view, tentatively held, is that the lack of consensus in philosophy does tend to undermine philosophy's claim to be knowledge.

Consensus and Truth

I maintain, and Fuchs will agree, that the following propositions are true if not platitudinous.

1) Truth does not entail consensus. If a proposition is true, it is true whether or not there is consensus with respect to its truth.

2) Consensus does not entail truth. If most or all experts agree that p, it does not follow that p is true.

3) Consensus and truth are logically independent. This follows from (1) in conjunction with (2). One can have truth without consensus and consensus without truth. 

Lack of consensus, therefore, does not demonstrate lack of truth. Even if no philosophical proposition wins the agreement of a majority of competent practitioners, it is possible that some such propositions are true. But it doesn't follow that some philosophical propositions have 'scientific quality.'  To have this quality they have to be true, but they also have to be knowable by us.  But what is knowability and how does it relate to consensus? To answer this question we must first clarify some other notions.

Truth, Knowledge, Knowability, Cognitivity, Justification, and Certainty

I add to our growing list the following  propositions, perhaps not all platitudinous and perhaps not all agreeable to Fuchs:

4) Knowledge entails truth. If S knows that p, it follows that p is true. There is no false knowledge. There are false beliefs, and indeed  justified false beliefs; but there is no false knowledge. You could think of this as an conceptual truth, or as a truth about the essence of knowledge. These are different because a concept is not the same as an essence.

5) Truth does not entail knowledge. If p is true, it does not follow that someone (some finite mind or ectypal intellect) knows that p.  If an omniscient being, an archetypal intellect, exists, then of course every true proposition p is known by the omniscient being.

6) Truth does not entail knowability by us. If, for any proposition p,  p is true, it does not follow that there is any finite subject S such that S has the power to know p. There may be truths which, though knowable 'in principle,' or knowable by the archetypal intellect, are not knowable by us.

7) Cognitivity does not entail knowability. Let us say that a proposition is cognitive just in case it has a truth value. Assuming bivalence, a proposition is cognitive if and only if it is either true, or if not true, then false. Clearly, cognitivity is insufficient for knowability. For if a proposition is false, then it is cognitive but cannot be known because it is false. And if a proposition is true, then it is cognitive but may not be knowable because beyond our ken.

8) Knowledge entails justification. If S believes that p, and p is true, it does not follow that S knows that p. For knowledge, justification is also required. This is a bit of epistemological boilerplate that dates back to Plato's Theaetetus.

9) Knowledge entails objective certainty.  Knowledge implies the sure possession, by the subject of knowledge, the knower, of the object of knowledge; if the subject is uncertain, then the subject does not have knowledge strictly speaking.  Objective certainty is not to be confused with subjective certitude.

Consensus and Knowledge

Fuchs and I will agree that consensus is not necessary for truth: a true proposition need not be one that enjoys the consensus of experts. But consensus may well be necessary for knowledge.  Fuchs, however, seems to conflate truth and certainty, and thus truth with knowledge.  A truth can be true without being known by us; indeed, without even being knowable by us. But, necessarily, whatever is known is true.  On p. 30 we read:

By denying that the thought processes of philosophers can exhibit a scientific quality simply because of the existence of discord among philosophers, we make consensus a necessary condition for the general validity and potential certainty of scientific knowledge, which is the attribute of science. (Emphasis added.)

On the following page we find the same thought but with a replacement of 'potential certainty' by 'certainty':

. . . the necessary question of whether the consensus of experts is really such an essential and indispensable condition for the certainty and general validity of scientific knowledge. (31, emphasis added.)

When one speaks of the validity of a proposition, one means its truth. ('Valid' as a terminus technicus in formal logic is not in play here.) So it seems clear that Fuchs is maintaining that consensus is necessary neither for the truth of propositions nor for their certainty.  He seems to be maintaining that one can have certain knowledge of a proposition even if the consensus of experts goes against one. This is not obvious. Why not?

Knowledge requires justification. Now suppose I accept the proposition that God exists and that my justification takes the form of various arguments for the existence of God.   Those arguments will be faulted by an army of competent practitioners, not all of them atheists, on a variety of grounds. What's more, the members of the atheist divisions will marshal their own positive arguments, the strongest of them being arguments from evil. Now if just one of my theistic arguments is sound, then God exists.

But I do not, by giving a sound argument for God, know that God exists unless I know that the argument I have given is sound.  (A sound argument is a valid deductive argument all of the premises of which are true.) But how do I know that even one of my theistic arguments is sound? How can I legitimately claim to know that when a chorus of my epistemic peers rises up against me?  

If what I maintain is true, then it is true no matter how many epistemic peers oppose me: they are just wrong! Truth is absolute: it is not sensitive to the vagaries of agreement and disagreement. Justification, however, is sensitive to agreement and disagreement. My justification for considering a certain argument sound is undermined by your disagreement assuming that we are both competent in the subject matter of the argument and we are epistemic peers.  

In a situation in which my justification for believing that p is undermined by the disagreement of competent peers, there is no objective certainty that p. If knowledge logically requires objective certainty, and objective certainty is destroyed by the disagreement of competent epistemic peers, then I can no longer legitimately claim to know that p. So, while truth has nothing to fear from lack of agreement, knowledge does. For knowledge requires justification, and justification can be augmented or diminished by agreement or disagreement, respectively.

Interim Conclusion

Fuchs makes things too easy for himself by conflating truth and knowledge. We can agree that consensus is logically irrelevant to truth.  Protracted disagreement by the (morally) best and the (intellectually) brightest over the truth value of some proposition  p has no tendency to show either deductively or inductively that p is not either true or false. Truth is absolute by its very nature and thus insulated from the vagaries of opinion. But truths (true propositions) do not do us any good unless we can know them.  It is not enough to know that some truths are known; what we need is to know of a given truth that it is true. But disagreement inserts a skeptical blade between the truth and our knowledge of it.

Disagreement in philosophy undermines her claims to knowledge.  As I see it, Fuchs has done nothing to undermine this undermining.

Reader Requests Advice re: Learning Basics of Philosophical Argumentation

A New Zealand reader writes,
 
I was hoping if you are able to provide me with some guidance regarding where to begin learning the basics of philosophical arguments. I’ve been trying to understand how to evaluate political and theological debates for awhile, but despite my interest I often find them go away over my head. I found your Substack a couple of weeks ago and was delighted to find your articles not only quite easy to follow but made plenty of sense. So I thought why not give it a try and ask you for help in getting better critical thinking. It would be wonderful if you are able to help with this.
 
Many thanks,
Cameron
 
I am happy to be of assistance, Cameron. Jay F. Rosenberg's The Practice of Philosophy: A Handbook for Beginners comes to mind.
 
Your question has been put to me before. Here is a post from 2011 in which I make a few other suggestions. You will also find the comment thread to that post useful.
 
If anyone wants to help Cameron in his quest, comments are enabled below.
 

Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added:

For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a law, a code of divine origin. Accordingly, the religious science, the sacra doctrina, is not dogmatic theology, theologia revelata, but the science of the law, halaka or fiqh. The science of the law, thus understood has much less in common with philosophy than has dogmatic theology. Hence the status of philosophy is, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in the Islamic-Jewish world than it is in the Christian world. No one could become a competent Christian theologian without having studied at least a substantial part of philosophy; philosophy was an integral part of the officially authorized and even required training. On the other hand, one could become an absolutely competent halakist or faqih without having the slightest knowledge of  philosophy. This fundamental difference doubtless explains the possibility of the later complete collapse of philosophical studies in the Islamic world, a collapse which has no parallel in the West in spite of Luther.

I like the "in spite of Luther."  What is Strauss getting at? I turn to Heiko A. Oberman' s magisterial Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 1989, tr. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart). On p. 160, Oberman speaks of the new Wittenberg theology that Luther formulated "against the whole of scholasticism": "The whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light."

Why do I like the "in spite of Luther?" Because I am averse to Protestantism for three solid reasons: it is anti-monastic, anti-mystical, and anti-philosophical (anti-rational).  No doubt the RCC is even more corrupt now under Bergoglio the Termite than it was in Luther's day; so if this maverick decides he needs a church, he will have to make the journey to the (near) East.  Go east old man! (I plan to report later on Vladimir Lossky's The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.)  But here's a bit more Oberman to nail down my point about Protestantism (or at least Lutheranism's ) being anti-philosophical:

The knowledge that there was an infinite, qualitative distance between Heaven and earth became an established principle for Luther as early as 1509: all human thought, as noble, effective, and indispensable as it might be to solve problems in the world, does not suffice to fathom salvation because it cannot cannot reach Heaven.  Questions of faith must be resolved through the Word of God or not at all. The temptation — or compulsion — to sanctify the words of an and believe in them is satanic. When God is silent, man should not speak; and what God has put asunder, namely Heaven and earth, man should not join together.

Thus not even Augustine, especially Augustine the neo-Platonist, could become the new, infallible authority, because that would merely have been replacing one philosophy with another, substituting Plato for Aristotle. [. . .]

The alternative is clear: whatever transcends the perception of empirical reality is either based on God's Word or is pure fantasy. As a nominalist Luther began making a conscious distinction between knbowledge of tge world and faith in God . . . . (pp. 160-161, emphasis added)

A quick question: given sola scriptura, where in the Scriptures does God deliver his verdict on the  problem of universals and come down on the side of nominalism? And if Holy Writ is silent on the famous problem, then it is "pure fantasy" and Luther has no justification for his nominalism. 

And what about sola scriptura itself? Where in the Bible is the doctrine enunciated?

Romanists 1; Lutherans 0. And this despite the undeniable corruption of the RCC in those days that triggered Luther's protest.

The Idea of Inevitable Progress versus Archaism

Philosophers and theologians alike should heed a distinction I found in Henri de Lubac's magisterial The Mystery of the Supernatural (Herder and Herder, 2001, originally published in French in 1965, p. 18):

Lastly, returning to the essence of an older position can never be purely and simply a return. Archaism . . . of this kind is always deceptive. It is as illusory, in the reverse sense, as the idea of inevitable progress.  "Those who wrote before us are not our masters, but our leaders" [non domini nostri sed duces fuerunt]. (Guibert de Tournai, "De modo addiscendi," Revue neo-scholastique, 1922 : 226)

 

Reading Now: Karl Barth, Henri Bouillard, Erich Przywara

'Now' above refers to March 2003. Tempus fugit! This unfinished post has been languishing in storage and now wants to see the light of day. Fiat lux!

…………………………………….

I'm on a bit of theological jag at present. The updating of my SEP divine simplicity entry has occasioned my review of recent literature on modal collapse arguments against DDS, some of it by theologians. See the final section for the modal collapse arguments.

Henri Bouillard's The Knowledge of God (Herder and Herder, 1968) introduced me to Karl Barth.  Bouillard is a philosopher, Barth a theologian.  Both are in quest of the Absolute but in different ways. But completeness demands a tripartite distinction between philosopher, theologian, and mystic.

Thomas Aquinas, the Great Synthesizer, is all three at different times and in different texts. The natural theology of the praeambula fidei is philosophy, not theology strictly speaking. To argue from the mundus sensibilis to an extra-mundane causa prima is to do natural theology, which is a branch of philosophy.  No use is made by the philosopher qua philosopher of divine revelation. There is no appeal to the supernatural. Recourse is only to (discursive/dianoetic) reason and the deliverances of the senses.  Properly theological topics, on the other hand, among them  Trinity and Incarnation, are knowable only via revelation, which presupposes faith. They are not knowable by philosophical methods. Whether cognitio fidei (knowledge by faith) should be called knowledge is an important but vexing question, especially for those of us who toil in the shadow of the great Descartes. I have something to say about it here in connection with Edith Stein and her first and second 'masters,' the neo-Cartesian Edmund Husserl and Thomas Aquinas, respectively.

A third source of insight into the Absolute is via mysticism which promises direct access to God as opposed to access via discursive operations from the side of the finite subject and/or access via divine communication from God to man via Scripture. As I understand Barth so far in my study of him, he denies that God reveals himself in the created world or via the teaching authority of any church, let alone the church of Rome. On his account we know God only from God. Revelation is confined to Scripture and to God Incarnate, Jesus Christ. So there is no access to God via natural theology nor through direct mystical insight. 

Erich Przywara (1889-1972) somewhere in his stupendous Analogia  Entis (orig. publ. in German in 1962, English tr. by Betz and Hart, Eerdmans 2014) adds a fourth category, that of the theological philosopher. But I have forgotten what exactly he means by 'theological philosopher.'

He who quests for the Absolute may therefore wear one or more of four hats: philosopher, theologian (narrow or proper sense), mystic, or theological philosopher. Might there be other 'hats'? That of the moral reformer? That of the the beauty-seeker?